Rack enhancement that fits in 2U.
By Pine Heights Ventures LLC dba Costa Mesa Tech Solutions
Live LED signage for your server rack. RackTicker turns two 64×32 RGB LED panels and a Raspberry Pi into a 128×32 ticker that lives in a 19-inch rack: stock tape, odds boards, news, flights overhead, weather and a pixel town, with more in the community catalog. Every screen is a plugin, the bundled data sources are free and need no key, and nothing needs a cloud account. Run it on your computer first: the browser emulator shows the exact pixels the panels will.
To write your own screen, fork the
plugin starter
or run python -m app.dev new my_plugin. See Make a screen.
| Screen | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Stock tape | The day's movers and your watchlist with company names, sparklines and each company's latest headline, under a flipping index header |
| Sportsbook | A Vegas odds board: spreads, totals and moneylines, big live scores with the bases, count and outs or the down and distance, banners for big plays, fireworks when your team scores |
| News desk | Network channels with whole headlines two lines at a time, a TV lower third or a Times Square zipper |
| Flights | The planes overhead: airline mark, flight number and route, then destination, aircraft, altitude and time to go; a list when several are about, a fly-by when one is directly overhead. Local ADS-B receiver or a free network feed |
| Weather | Animated sky, hourly chart and four-day forecast |
| Pixel Town | A small town on real time in three districts: a beach with the real tide and swell, a high street with a taco truck and your weather, and a station with real departures. The panel is a camera that drifts between them. The beach and station use the Surf and Departures plugins when installed |
| Clocks | Desk clock (with a 4:20 surprise) and TIX Clock |
Community plugins live in their own repository and install from the Plugins page with one click:
| Plugin | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Departures | Live station boards: the London Underground in its own line colours, Metrolink and Amtrak across the United States, BART, and Budapest-Keleti, Roma Termini, Milan, Florence, Venice, Naples and Zürich, each in its country's style, with real delays, platforms, station announcements, and trains pulling in |
| Onboard | The strip map above the carriage doors of a train that is really running: the line, its stops, the train sliding along it, the next stop and how long until it |
| Tanks | California's reservoirs, and the space station's urine and water tanks, as sloshing water |
| Quakes | Earthquakes around you from the USGS on a 24-hour seismograph |
| Surf | Wave height, swell, water temperature and the tide at your break: the sea sits high or low with the real tide, with the next turn and which way it is going |
| Now playing | The song you're listening to like an old car stereo: album art, scrolling title, track and time, spectrum analyser. Spotify or Home Assistant |
| Virtual Aquarium | A tank of clownfish, angelfish and neon tetras, with swaying plants and a wandering snail |
| Retro Screensavers | 3D pipes, Mystify, a starfield, a bouncing badge and marquee text |
| Arcade | Pixel Quest, Tetris, Snake, Breakout, Invaders and Pong, played live by AIs |
| Formula 1 | A start-light gantry counting down to lights out, the last race's podium and the championship fight |
| Prediction markets | Polymarket and Kalshi: each question whole and still, then its odds slide up |
| LED sign | Your own words on a storefront sign: letters that assemble, drop and spin, in taqueria, Vegas, arena and Times Square styles |
| Freeway traffic | California freeways near you: CHP incidents, the real overhead message signs, and travel-time signs as they read over the road |
| Data from a link | Any value from a JSON address as a big card, no code |
Screens finish the headline, card or lap they are showing before the playlist moves on, skip themselves when they have nothing to show, and move on a frame-locked clock so crawls step exactly one LED per frame.
| Part | Notes |
|---|---|
| Raspberry Pi 3A+ | The reference build. A Pi Zero 2 W should work (untested); the original Zero W is too slow |
| 2 × Waveshare 64×32 P2.5 RGB LED matrix panels | HUB75, chained side by side: 320 × 80 mm of screen |
| WatangTech RGB Matrix Adapter Board | Sits on the Pi's header and drives the panels ("regular" pin mapping) |
| 5 V power supply with a barrel plug | Sized for your panels; 4 A or more is a good start. Match the adapter's jack |
| microSD card | 16 GB or more, Raspberry Pi OS Lite |
| 3D printed 2U rack face | Four parts and eight M3 × 10 screws; 88 mm of rack height. Print files on MakerWorld; guide in BEZEL_V10.md |
| USB ADS-B receiver (optional) | An RTL-SDR stick and antenna for planes overhead; without one, Flights uses a free network feed |
The panel frame is always exactly 128×32 RGB. Typography, clipping and motion are designed at that size, so what the emulator shows is what the panels show.
| The 2U face | Behind it |
|---|---|
 |
 |
Two panels, the adapter board on the Pi's header, one barrel jack for power, and an ADS-B stick if you want the planes overhead to be the ones actually overhead.
The whole build in order, from printing to first light, is in docs/assembly.md.
Python 3.10 or newer:
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
python -m appOpen http://localhost:8080/. On your own computer the control page is on port 8080. (Installed on a Pi it is on 8081; see below.) The first run starts a playlist of real screens and asks where the rack is.
Windows PowerShell:
py -3.12 -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m pip install -r requirements.txt
.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m apppython -m app --help lists options (--port, --config, --host 0.0.0.0 to
open it to your LAN, --output hub75 on a Pi).
-
With Raspberry Pi Imager, flash Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit). Under Edit Settings, set a hostname (for example
rackticker), a user and password, your Wi-Fi, and enable SSH. -
Boot it, SSH in once, and run:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/costamesatechsolutions/rackticker/main/tools/install.sh | sudo bashIt builds the panel driver, reboots, and installs the newest release by itself (about ten minutes on a Pi 3A+).
-
Open the control page at
http://<your-pi>:8081/(port 8081, not 8080). The panels show the address when they light up, by name and by IP:rackticker.local:8081or192.168.1.50:8081. The name is the hostname you set in the imager. If.localdoes not resolve (some Windows and Android setups), use the IP.
That is the last time you need SSH:
- Updates: Settings → Software shows when a new version is out; press Update. The new version is installed beside the running one, and if it does not come up healthy within a minute RackTicker switches back to the old one by itself.
- Self-healing: every day, and at boot, RackTicker checks its installed files against fingerprints taken at install and repairs anything damaged, from the previous version or a fresh download.
- Wi-Fi setup mode: with no Wi-Fi saved, or after five minutes without the
saved one (new router, new password, moved house), the panel shows
Wi-Fi setup: join the
RackTicker-Setupnetwork with your phone, pick your Wi-Fi on the page that opens, and it reconnects. If the old network comes back, it rejoins by itself. A working connection is never touched. - Reset: Settings → Software, as far back as you like. Settings and plugins keeps a backup of your old settings and leaves Wi-Fi alone; Wi-Fi only forgets the network and opens setup mode, for when RackTicker moves house without you; Everything clears settings, plugins, the password and Wi-Fi; Ready to pass on does all of that and then some (see below).
- Password: optional, in Settings → Software. Forgot it? Unplug RackTicker as soon as its panel lights up, three times in a row; on the next start the panel says PASSWORD CLEARED. No computer needed.
- Crash protection: if RackTicker keeps stopping, it goes back to the previous version.
Settings → Software → Reset → Ready to pass on hands a unit over clean. It clears settings, installed plugins, plugin logins, the control page password and the saved Wi-Fi, wipes the system log and shell history, and clears the device's own identity (machine id, ssh host keys and name). Then it powers off; wait for the panel to go dark before unplugging.
Cards cloned from one image without that step share a machine id, ssh host keys and
.local name, so the Pis clash on a network. After Ready to pass on, each card's first
boot makes its own and names itself from its Pi's serial number (for example
rackticker-3c4d). The panel shows the name and address it settled on.
To make a master card: set one up, reset it Ready to pass on, then image the card once it has powered off.
Developing from a computer: RACKTICKER_PI_HOST=pi@rackticker.local ./tools/deploy_pi.sh
installs your committed working copy the same way, with the same health check and rollback.
The companion accepts every standard rpi-rgb-led-matrix --led-* flag from
/etc/rackticker/matrix.conf (installed once, never overwritten by updates);
restart it with sudo systemctl restart rackticker-matrix after editing.
- Flicker: the default
--led-limit-refresh=120holds one steady refresh rate. Unlimited, the reference build swung from 208 Hz down to 93 Hz whenever the Pi was busy decoding ADS-B, which shows as bursts of flicker. Measure your panel with--led-show-refreshand keep the limit below its lowest rate. - Colours: press Settings → Developer tools → Colour test and check each block matches its label. If
GREEN shows blue (and amber looks pink), your panels are wired RBG: add
--led-rgb-sequence=RBG. - Dim colours:
--led-pwm-lsb-nanoseconds=160(the default here) keeps very low brightness from drifting pink. - Other hardware: for example an Adafruit bonnet:
--led-gpio-mapping=adafruit-hat --led-rows=32 --led-cols=64 --led-chain=2.
- Now: the live panel, what is playing, Pause and Next, a tile per screen to put it up now, panel on/off, brightness and a quick message.
- Screens: the playlist. Switch screens on and off, set their seconds, reorder, and open any screen's settings: team pickers by name, league chips, city search.
- Plugins: switch plugins on and off, install from a GitHub link or the community list, update, restart, remove.
- Settings: home location, brightness and night dimming, transitions, Home Assistant, and developer tools.
The page is open by default and binds to 127.0.0.1 unless you pass --host (the Pi
install passes it, so the page is on your network). Set a password under
Settings → Software if you want one. Everything the page does is also a small JSON
API under /api/.
Settings → Home Assistant connects RackTicker to an MQTT broker (the Mosquitto add-on works). It appears in Home Assistant as a device by itself: a light for on/off and brightness, a Screen picker, a Show … switch for every screen, Next and a Message box. Expose those switches to Alexa or Google through Home Assistant (or its Matter bridge) and say "turn on Show Sportsbook".
A plugin is a folder with a plugin.json and a Python file; you never edit RackTicker
itself. Fork the
plugin starter
or scaffold your own:
python -m app.dev new surf_report # a working starting point
python -m app.dev check surf_report # renders preview.png / preview.gif and reports problems
python -m app.dev preview surf_report # live in the browser, reloads on save
python -m app.dev push surf_report --to rackticker.local:8081Share it as a folder in a public GitHub repository: anyone installs it by pasting the link
into Plugins → Add a plugin, and updates it with one click. Installed plugins run in
their own sandboxed process, so a crash or hang restarts only that plugin and the display
never waits for it. The scaffold includes an AGENTS.md with the panel's rules, so an AI
coding agent can build and check a screen on its own. To list yours for everyone, open a
pull request against the
community plugins repository
with one folder and one catalog entry. Full guide: docs/plugins.md.
Animation time is counted in integer units, so a 30 px/s crawl at 30 fps moves one
LED every frame for weeks. Data providers run on their own thread and hand feed
parsing to a helper process, so a 1 MB market feed never freezes a frame; installed
plugins run in their own processes entirely. Frames slower than 25 ms and loop
stalls are recorded under perf in /api/state. Details:
docs/architecture.md.
Rendering runs as an unprivileged service. A small root-owned C++ companion alone owns the GPIO and takes frames over a local socket, and the updater and network keeper are separate root services the web page can only ask.
python -m unittest discover -s tests -t .
python -m tools.render_demo # regenerate docs/demo.gif from live dataSee CONTRIBUTING.md and AGENTS.md.
AGPL-3.0-only. Copyright (c) 2026 RackTicker contributors. The original fonts and assets are covered by the same license; dependencies keep their own. The control page links to the license and a source archive of the running core. See LICENSE and the plugin licensing notes.
The printable enclosure (hardware/) is licensed separately under
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: print it, remix it,
share it, but don't sell it.